Fieldwork Forum (FForum)

When? Wednesdays 3:10PM-4:00PM

Where? Fall 2024 - Spring 2025 hybrid format (in-person in Dwinelle 1303 and via Zoom; email organizers for passcode)

What? We are a working group dedicated to the critical examination of methodologies in language documentation, description, and revitalization, as well as to the linguistic and ethnohistorical analysis that falls out from that work. Our aim is to learn from and ultimately improve upon methods for carrying out more rigorous, insightful and ethical linguistic and cultural documentation, revitalization, and revival, as well as to help researchers implement those methods.

How? Fieldwork Forum is made possible through a Working Group Grant provided by the Townsend Center for the Humanities at the University of California, Berkeley.

Who? FForum is organized by Abby Roberts (asroberts@berkeley.edu) and Tyler Lee-Wynant (tleewynant@berkeley.edu). We welcome all those interested in linguistic fieldwork, with all levels of experience, including those in other departments. To join our mailing list, please write to the organizers.

See a list of our past talks here.

Upcoming Meetings

February 5, 2025 - Issues and Ideas

This will be a casual meeting where folks can talk about challenges they're facing in their current fieldwork projects, and others can provide tips or advice. Come with challenges or questions (logistic or linguistic) and/or your own experience, knowledge, and lessons learned!

Past Meetings

November 13, 2024 - Vasileios Michos (Boston University)

(Dis-)similarities and challenges working with diasporic communities; a case study of dialectal fieldwork

In this talk, I’ll go through challenges that arise when one attempts to do micro-comparative fieldwork in their native language. In studying three different dialects of Greek, each in varying levels of endangerment, I describe several non-linguistic factors that have a say on each variety’s vitality. I also raise the question of whether and how factors that are generally perceived as good for the social well-being might in fact be an obstacle to a specific variety’s vitality. Going through three different communities, I lastly describe the non-homogeneous language attitudes that under-represented communities have.

November 1, 2024 - Zachary O'Hagan and Lev Michael (UC Berkeley)

Combined meeting with SSCircle

Reconsidering Chamikuro Tense-marked Determiners: Methodological and Analytical Perspectives

This presentation reports on some of the results of six weeks of fieldwork in the summer of 2024 with Alfonso Patow Chota, likely the most fluent living speaker of Chamikuro, an Arawakan language of Peruvian Amazonia. Parker (1999) makes the typologically remarkable claim (cf. Matthewson 2005) that  Chamikuro exhibits two tensed “definite articles,” =na and =ka, which express non-past and past tense, respectively (“T on D”; Wiltschko 2003 inter alia). He describes them as modifying nouns to their right, but cliticizing to hosts to their left. Significantly, Parker’s claims have been widely cited in the literature (e.g., Adamou 2015; Leu to appear; Nordlinger and Sadler 2004a, 2004b).

We argue that these markers are not articles, and indeed, not systematically associated with DPs at all. We instead argue that they form part of a larger paradigm of spatio-temporal clitics, together with =la, and that =na is in fact spatio-temporally underspecified rather than being a non-past tense marker per se. We also provide a refined description of the morphosyntactic distribution of these three clitics, showing that their tendency to appear immediately before DPs, which inspired Parker’s analysis, is epiphenomenal, and results from a restriction against their appearing at the right edges of certain phrasal and clausal boundaries. In this context, we also demonstrate that =ka exhibits an allomorph =ka:ti, which appears in syntactic positions in which =ka is disallowed. Our analysis thus removes this apparently unique case of tensed determiners from the literature and instead integrates these markers into a more general system of spatio-temporal deixis in Chamikuro.

October 2, 2024 - Paper Discussion

A group discussion of "The promises and perils of positionality statements" by Kendall A. King (Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 2024), talking about how identity and experience may impact one's research but also how that impact may be expressed.

September 18, 2024 - Round Robin

Discussion of recent/summer fieldwork activities